Biden admin withdraws human rights nomination over Israel apartheid comments

Human rights advocates are warning that the Biden administration’s decision to withdraw its nomination of law professor James Cavallaro to serve on a human rights commission could be the latest incident that chills free speech regarding violent Israeli policies in Palestine, as Cavallaro said he was shut out of the position due to his condemnation of Israel’s apartheid regime.

Cavallaro was nominated last Friday to sit on the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a watchdog within the Organization for American States which he previously served on from 2014-17.

The nomination was met with applause from the human rights advocacy community, but on Tuesday Cavallaro said on social media that he’d been informed by the U.S. State Department that the nomination had been withdrawn “due to my statements denouncing apartheid in Israel/Palestine.”

Cavallaro, the founder and executive director of the University Network for Human Rights (UNHR) at Wesleyan University, said he responded to the State Department’s news by noting that mainstream human rights groups including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Israeli organization B’Tselem have all stated that Israel’s illegal settlements, restriction of Palestinians’ movement, and other policies amount to apartheid. The United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in Palestine also said last year that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories is apartheid.

The Algemeiner, a newspaper that the UNHR called “a fringe, Trump-affiliated media outlet” in a statement Wednesday, reported on Cavallaro’s comments about Israel as an “apartheid state” on Monday, in an article that also focused on a tweet written by Cavallaro in December saying U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) has been “Bought. Purchased. Controlled” by the anti-Palestinian rights lobby.

That tweet was written in response to a Guardian article detailing Jeffries’ close ties to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and other pro-Israel lobbying groups, which donated $460,000 to the Democratic leader last year. Cavallaro also tweeted that right-wing Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) was “bought and paid for.”

“We were not aware of the statements and writings,” U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price said in a statement Tuesday.

Cavallaro acknowledged on Wednesday that he removed some of his tweets “proactively and in good faith,” to address the State Department’s concerns about his public statements on his “personal views on U.S. policy.”

The withdrawal of Cavallaro’s nomination comes a month after the Harvard Kennedy School, under pressure, reversed its decision to rescind a fellowship invitation to former Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth. The longtime rights campaigner accused the school of retaliating against him for his statements about apartheid in Israel.

The decision to withdraw Cavallaro’s nomination, said Roth, “suggests that only Israeli apologists are acceptable” for human rights positions. He noted that the UNHR director’s views on Israel are “a completely mainstream position for any human rights defender.”

David Kaye, a former U.N. special rapporteur on free expression, called the withdrawal “a huge and totally unjustified mistake.”